Chapter 4. Web Services

The primary purpose of ASP.NET web services is to provide access to application functionality through standard web protocols (including HTTP and XML), regardless of the application's location or the platform on which it is built. When your application exposes functionality as a web service, that functionality can be consumed by clients on any platform, presuming the clients understand XML and SOAP and can communicate via the HTTP protocol. More plainly, a web service is a function that is called over the Internet.

An ASP.NET web service can be very simple or it can provide complex functionality. It can return a variety of data types from simple strings and integer values to complex data types such as classes and datasets. Web services are traditionally thought of as providing only business services (e.g., you call a method, perhaps passing in some parameters, and you receive a return value), but there's no reason why you can't create a web service that returns a chunk of HTML. Doing so would allow you to provide cross-platform access to functionality similar to that provided by ASP.NET Server Controls, albeit with some performance overhead.